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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

My point is that there is no proposed alternative. Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google? The answer is that privacy is not valuable enough to most people to endure the switching costs and alternative solutions don't even exist.

So the discussion then comes down to going offline all together (which no one will do) or as this OP asks for: more regulation. Only that further slows down the pace of innovation and further entrenches the large players due to regulatory capture.

The article you post is a perfect example of why privacy doesn't matter. Do you think the average FB user will wade through that then erase their account? No. They want the value they get out of FB and nowhere in the counter argument is any suggestion of alternatives.

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> Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google?

The tongue-in-cheek answer to this is that they all eventually get bought by Facebook or Google. Anything that poses a threat to Facebook or Google will fold for the right price, as a simple matter of serving the fiduciary interest of the investors.

The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization. They have no pitch to make to investors, no funds for promotion, but the technology is there. Mastodon and Matrix are proof.

The technology is dead simple. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are nothing but glorified shiny message boards. WhatsApp, Discord, and Skype are nothing but glorified shiny VoIP apps. The only thing that makes them special is the branding

I'd go even further and say that the larger platforms are anti-privacy by design, because their core purpose has always been concerned with data collection. I think the large online social networks are in the same vein fundamentally rightwing, because profiting from the efforts of others has nothing whatsoever to do with leftism.

IRL, if you want privacy, you avoid groups. I don't see why the digital realm should be viewed any differently. So there's a duality with social networkers, in that they may want privacy for themselves, yet a large reason for being on those platforms is to learn about everyone else. From a safe distance.

> The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization.

They don't make money, tempt investors, or entice advertisers, for shit. You might not want that to be what defines a successful business right now, but it is.

> The technology is dead simple.

Not simple enough (IRC/Mastodon/dex-$x). People vote with their feet.

When something decentralized provides a better user experience than one of the behemoths, and figures out a way to market itself into network-effect prosperity, then things will improve. Until then, don't bother.

Duckduckgo is privacy-oriented google. Facebook is losing users in droves.

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